AXPONA 2014: VPI’s Nomad hits one into the bleachers

Okay, so maybe the VPI Nomad wasn’t exactly a surprise. Announced late last year, the “turntable solution” is just now heading out to greedy consumers — Music Direct‘s Bes Flores sold the first one while I was in the room this afternoon!

The turntable offers a lot for the $995 price. You get a turntable, obviously, with settings for both 33 and 45 rpm. The motor is all-new, and surprising to everyone (including VPI’s Matt Weisfeld), the motor is an improvement over what was available in the Traveler. The Nomad has a gimbaled-bearing tonearm and comes with an Ortofon 2M Red cartridge pre-installed. But that’s not all! There’s also a headphone amplifier. Oh, and an integrated phono preamp too. All you need is a pair of interconnects or headphones and your haul from Record Store Day, and you’re set.

It took me three attempts to worm my way into the standing-room only space, but a carefully thrown elbow or two, and I was in. There were three demo stations lined up against the side wall, with another in the main system. All three demos had a pair of Focal headphones attached and folks were invited to spin whatever they had on hand. You want to take a giant set up from your beat up old Technics? This might be a great stop. It has “hipster” and “college dorm” written all over it. Sound quality was surprising, even with the cherry-red Spirit One headphones. Good enough that I went ahead and requested a review unit. Stay tuned.

Like always, great article, I wonder how many audio enthusiasts are like me, at the point of no return to vinyl. Total respect for the Vinyl fans out there, I think the whole point is that I am too lazy to try it. Maybe some day LOL

The first generation Traveller had a surprisingly good motor, which was then changed for an inferior one for the next version so they could have one with a external universal power supply to reduce production cost for the worldwide market (I.e that worked for both 110 & 220v). It is a noisier and lower torque unit than the original – and yet the Traveller price was raised as well. So any new change to the motor would probably be an improvement – and hopefully not an occasion to raise the price again.

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